Competition between investment banks for lead underwriter mandates in IPOs is fierce, but having committed to a particular bank, the power of the issuer is greatly reduced. Although information revelation theories justify giving the underwriters influence over pricing and allocation, this...

This Paper uses evidence from a dataset of 27 European IPOs to analyse how investors bid and the factors that influence their allocations. We have the complete books for these deals – amounting to 5540 bids – and so can analyse directly how bids and allocations are related. All these deals...